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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
It is a strange quirk of intellectual history that essays in the comprehensive interpretation of history seem to have become fashionable in inverse proportion to the decline of system-building in philosophy. Given this tendency, however, it is not surprising that philosophical historians have again focussed their attention upon America and that new systematic interpretations of American development have come to light. One such interpretation returns to the theories of one of the most praised but most neglected students of American society: Alexis de Tocqueville. According to this view the crucial fact in American history is the absence of a European ancien régime. The leading exponent of the “back to de Tocqueville” movement adverts to what might be called “the storybook truth about American history: that America was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World.” If this view is correct, “then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the nonexistence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.” But in this sense of the term, “liberal” America was not the only “liberal” community, for America was not the only country which created a frontier existence free of many of the restraints of the old European society. Australia developed a comparable frontier life, and it had no entrenched aristocracy of the European sort.
1 The author is indebted to Professor Dean E. McHenry of U.C.L.A. and Professor S. S. McCulloch of Rutgers for their useful criticism of a draft of this article. Needless to say, they do not incur any responsibility for what follows.
2 This peculiar relationship was first noted by Professor Crane Brinton in a review article in The New York Times.
3 The historian in question is ProfessorHartz, Louis of Harvard, , and the signal work is The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.
4 Hartz, , The Liberal Tradition in America, p. 3Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., p. 3.
6 I shall use “liberal” in three ways in this essay. The first meaning applies to those Western states which have a tradition of representative government and respect for individual rights. The second refers to “natural liberalism” and applies to a society which has managed to escape the feudal stage of history. The third denotes a specific economic doctrine. The context should make clear the meaning intended in each case.
7 As I hope to show below, the absence of an old regime “of the European sort” did not prevent Australia from developing its own peculiar version of the old society.
8 Democracy in America, ed. Bradley, Phillips (New York, 1956), II, 108Google Scholar. What is meant here is not that the Revolution was not the originator of social change; it is simply that: “if we identify the social upheavals of 1776 in America with those of the great European revolutions, we shall never be able to understand them. It is the fact that feudal relics such as primogeniture abolished by the American revolutionaries were indeed relics — which explains the nation of their abolition” (Hartz, , op. cit., p. 67Google Scholar).
9 I am aware of the difficulties of using the word “feudal” to describe institutions which existed long after the mediaeval period. In this paper it is used to denote the special privileges of the European landed aristocracy before the French Revolution, and its derivative, “feudalism” will be employed interchangeably with ancien régime, old regime, etc.
10 Hartz states, for example: “One of the central characteristics of a nonfeudal society is that it lacks the genuine revolutionary tradition, the tradition which in Europe has been linked with the Puritan and French revolutions: that it is ‘born free’ as Tocqueville said. And this being the case, it also lacks a tradition of reaction: lacking Robespierre, it lacks Maistre, lacking Sydney, it lacks Charles II. Its liberalism is what Santayana called, referring to American democracy, a ‘natural’ phenomenon” (Ibid., p. 5). Boorstin, Daniel J., The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953), pp. 68–70Google Scholar.
11 Collier, James, The Pastoral Age in Australia (London, 1911)Google Scholar, Chaps. 12, 45, 46 and passim.
12 I do not wish to maintain that America had no trace of an aristocracy while Australia may be characterized in terms of one. The difference between the two countries is that while the aristocratic ethos was largely uncharacteristic of the total American experience, a kind of aristocratic ethos dominated a segment of Australian history.
13 In 1900, 63.7 per cent of American farms were owner-operated (U. S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1931, p. 647Google Scholar).
14 Hartz, , op. cit., p. 22Google Scholar.
15 Brady, Alexander, Democracy in the Dominions (Toronto, 1947), p. 126Google Scholar. It should be noted that the Australian frontier was partially reopened to the agriculturist in the eighteen sixties and seventies.
16 Fitzpatrick, Brian, The Australian People, 1788–1945 (Melbourne, 1946), Chap. 18Google Scholar.
17 Harper, N. D., “Turner the Historian: ‘Hypothesis’ or ‘Process’ ?”, University of Kansas City Review, XVIII (No. 1, Autumn, 1951), 79–80Google Scholar.
18 Contrasting Australia with America, Paul F. Sharp comments: “In Australia, on the other hand, a barren desert heartland confined effective settlement to coastal belts and forced an industrial, urban pattern upon the community relatively earlier than in North America. Sharp conflicts between capital and labor, the predominance of the urban community, and the emergence of a successful labor party in Australia were in part a product of the failure of the continent to provide the geographical base for a nation of small farmers, so familiar in the New World of the northern hemisphere” (“Three Frontiers: Some Comparative Studies of Canadian, American and Australian Settlement,” Pacific Historical Review, XXIV [No. 4, 11, 1955], 371Google Scholar). See also Harper, , loc. cit., p. 82Google Scholar. It is worth mentioning that the plan of “systematic colonization” urged by Edward Gibbon Wakefield which was partially implemented in Australia fostered the creation of a group of “landed proprietors, who do not work the land themselves, but supply the capital to hire landless men to cultivate for them” Mills, R. C., The Colonization of Australia (1829–42) [London, 1915], p. 329)Google Scholar.
19 Professor Crawford tells us: “the colonial social hierarchy lacked the appearance of permanence that marked the old world. It carried no sanction of long and inherited custom, and change of status was a familiar colonial experience even before the rapid changes of fortune that marked the years of the gold discoveries. Therefore, social divisions were neither accepted as an inevitable part of the social order nor regarded as something which could be altered only by a radical subversion of the whole” Crawford, R. M., Australia [London, 1952], p. 107Google Scholar.
20 The measure of their fall from power is captured in a few sentences by Professor Blackton: “It is probable that any plan endorsed by the Australian conservatives, the Anglo-Australians, the great pastoralists and graziers was doomed in Australia any time between 1850 and 1900” (Blackton, C. S., “Australian Nationality and Nationalism: The Imperial Federationist Interlude, 1885–1901,” Historical Studies, Australia and New Zealand, VII [No. 25, 11, 1955], 14Google Scholar.
21 It was not accidental that unionism won its first victories on the station. As Professor Alexander says: “The pastoral frontier also made a continuing contribution to Australian democracy through the Amalgamated Shearers' Union, the ‘central pillar of the Australian Labour temple,’ and the Australian Workers' Union, both before and after Labour entered the political arena” Alexander, Fred, Moving Frontiers, an American Theme and its Application to Australian History [Melbourne, 1947], p. 33, n. 51Google Scholar.
22 See, for example, Crawford, , op. cit., p. 103Google Scholar and Alexander, , op. cit., p. 33Google Scholar.
23 Hancock, W. K., Australia (Sydney, 1945), p. 12Google Scholar.
24 See Crowley, F. K., “The Foundation Years, 1788–1821,” in Australia, a Social and Political History, ed. Greenwood, Gordon (New York, 1955), pp. 12–14Google Scholar.
25 Trevelyan, G. M., British History in the Nineteenth Century and After, 1782–1919 (London, 1937), p. 252Google Scholar.
26 The influence of the Chartists on Australian social development can be overstated, but it is significant to note that “many of [the Chartist] points were incorporated in the state constitutions of the six colonies in the decade following the abortive Eureka rebellion of December 1854” (Harper, , loc. cit., p. 81Google Scholar).
27 American historians today do not generally believe that the West or the frontier actually provided homesteads for many members of the urban working classes. They are by no means unanimous, however, on the frontier as a potential safety-valve, drawing westward Eastern farmers who might otherwise have swelled the ranks of urban labor. Dale, Edward Everett, “Memories of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXX (12, 1943), 339–358CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goodrich, Carter and Davison, Sol, “The Wage-Earner in the Westward Movement I,” Political Science Quarterly, L (06, 1935), 161–185CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Wage-Earner in the Westward Movement II,” Political Science Quarterly, LI (03, 1936), 61–116Google Scholar; Shannon, Fred A., in “A Post Mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory,” Agricultural History, XIX (01, 1945)Google Scholar. The point, of course, is not that the West was a safety-valve which prevented all labor discontent, nor, is it denied that the movement from the farm to the city was a pervasive phenomenon of the latter part of the 19th century; it is that the existence of cheap land on the frontier provided a means of escape for both immigrants and native Easterners which otherwise might have been forced to accept a life as members of the urban proletariat.
28 Professor Harper remarks: “Australian society was as fluid as American society: this is symbolized in one way by the worker's constant choice, ‘Sydney or the bush’” (Harper, , loc. cit., p. 84Google Scholar). Professor Hartwell catches the significance of the city as a safety-valve when he notes: “Australia in 1850 had some of the character of the American frontier, but whereas the mainspring of American democracy was in the geographical frontier of the West, the origin of Australian democracy was in the cities” R. M. Hartwell, “The Pastoral Ascendancy, 1820–1850” in Greenwood, , op. cit., p. 95)Google Scholar.
29 Hartwell, , loc. cit., p. 95Google Scholar.
30 The Australian frontier was almost the American city in social and economic terms. Australias's peculiar safety-valve strengthened Australia's radicalism, for urban life is in a sense intrinsically radical.
31 See Alexander, , op. cit., pp. 27–28Google Scholar; and Harper, , loc. cit., p. 79Google Scholar.
32 One should not underestimate the role of the gold camps in the democratization of Australian life, but neither should one “attribute all egalitarian movements after 1851 to the discovery of gold” Clark, C. M. H., ed. Select Documents in Australian History, 1851–1900 [Sydney, 1955], p. 2)Google Scholar. As I. D. McNaughtan writes: “Even without gold, the Australian colonies, with no traditional conservative class and without established institutions, would hardly have left the broad road from Benthamite liberalism through political democracy towards ‘state socialism,’ though they might well have travelled it more slowly” I. D. McNaughtan, “Colonial Liberalism, 1851–92,” in Greenwood, , op. cit., p. 99Google Scholar.
33 This difference is perhaps not accidental. The “levelling” of higher social elements was precisely the operation which Australian democracy had to perform upon the squatter.
34 See Daniel Boorstin's criticisms of the notion of a “preformation theory” (op. cit., pp. 8–22).
35 Hartz, , op. cit., p. 6Google Scholar.
36 The failure of Labor's attempt at bank nationalization after the Second World War is a case in point. Vile, M. J. C., “Judicial Review and Politics in Australia,” American Political Science Review, LI, No. 2 (06, 1957)Google Scholar.
37 For two contrasting views, Crisp, L. F., The Australian Federal Labour Party, 1901–1951 (London, 1955)Google Scholar, Chap. 14, and Whitington, Don, The House Will Divide (Melbourne, 1954)Google Scholar, Chap. 20.
38 “Indeed, as the New Deal shows, when you simply ‘solve problems’ on the basis of a submerged and absolute liberal faith, you can depart from Locke with a kind of inventive freedom that European liberal reformers and even European socialists, dominated by ideological systems, cannot duplicate” (Hartz, , op. cit., p. 10Google Scholar).
39 Ibid., pp. 260, 263.
40 Boorstin, , op. cit., pp. 1–7Google Scholar.
41 Cited in Hartz, , op. cit., p. 38Google Scholar.
42 The Bulletin, July 2, 1887, quoted in Clark, , op. cit., p. 800Google Scholar.
43 As Hartz says: “We have been able to dream of ourselves as emancipators of the world at the very moment that we have withdrawn from it. We have been able to see ourselves as saviors at the very moment that we have been isolationists” (op. cit., p. 38).
44 Lang regarded the French occupation of Tahiti as “an impudent interference with Australia's mission of civilization in the Pacific Ocean” (quoted in Sharp, , loc. cit., p. 375Google Scholar).
45 In a new assessment of America's “coming of age” Professor Hartz asserts: “The effort to break down this isolationism — to relate American history and politics to the Western pattern of which it is a part — is an effort which still lies ahead of us. And yet once again, is it not evident that our current situation is leading us inevitably in this direction” (“The Coming of Age of America,” American Political Science Review, LI, No. 2 [06, 1957], 483Google Scholar).
46 What Veblen Taught, ed. Mitchell, W. (New York, 1947), pp. 368–9Google Scholar. Cited in Hartz, , op. cit., p. 21nGoogle Scholar.
